Those involved in the Skripal damage assessment held Florez responsible for his betrayal and did not look for any other leak once the Spaniard had been detained. Things are rarely 100 per cent certain in the world of counter-intelligence but they felt confident they had discovered who was responsible for their man being in the Gulag.
A wheel of fortune had turned for the Spaniard, as he was led away to start his sentence in Estremera prison, not far from Madrid. In terms of the three betrayals I have mentioned, those necessary to resolve the questions that bedevilled Skripal, as the months of his sentence crept by, the Spanish case represents two of them: Skripal’s identification as an MI6 asset, and the information that in turn helped convince the Spanish authorities of Florez’s guilt. But what of the third betrayal? Before the wheel could turn again, and Skripal be freed, another layer of treachery, espionage, and deceit would have to be exposed, this time across the Atlantic.
14
OPERATION GHOST STORIES
It is mid-afternoon in Manhattan and a Russian agent named Anna Chapman is meeting her contact, *Roman. He has contacted her by phone and requested the meeting. Chapman, who has been in America for several months, has been making her reports back to the Centre via a laptop. Each Wednesday she has sent her material by a simple expedient almost undetectable in a modern city. She has gone to a cafe or restaurant and established a connection with another computer, one belonging to Russian intelligence people sitting nearby. Her file, encrypted, naturally, has been copied across to their machine by private wireless network without the operatives ever speaking or even necessarily seeing one another.
But there have been some problems with the transfers and Roman is sitting face to face with her. They discuss whether she should take the laptop back to Moscow with her – she’s due to make a trip in a fortnight – or whether he should take it to be checked out. Roman also tells her there’s another reason he has asked for the meeting. ‘There is a person here who is just like you, OK?’ he explains. ‘But, unlike you, this person is not here under her real name… I have documents for you to give her tomorrow morning.’
He produces a fake passport and gives it to Chapman. ‘This is not her real name, but you can call her this name if you wish.’ Roman describes the procedure for meeting the other agent, complete with holding a magazine so she can recognize Chapman as the courier. The woman who is coming to collect the passport will ask, ‘Excuse me, but haven’t we met in California last summer?’ Chapman’s reply was to be, ‘No, I think it was the Hamptons.’
There are certain indications that Chapman is a little suspicious of Roman, and she is right to be. On the indictment covering these events he is described as UC-1, short for undercover 1. UC-1 is an FBI agent.
Two and a half hours later, on the same day, 26 June 2010, and in a different city, another Federal agent, UC-2, is playing the role of a Russian handler too. His conversations involve Mikhail Semenko, a bright young Russian professional holding down a job in the Washington DC area. This encounter has also been engineered by the FBI, starting with a meeting on the street in which UC-2 asked Semenko whether they had met in Beijing. Like the New York conversation, these two started by discussing recent covert communications before the FBI man moved on to ask the Russian to do something for him.
Passing an envelope with $5,000 in it, UC-2 asked Semenko to take it the following morning to a hiding place under a bridge in a park in Arlington, Virginia. Another Russian agent would then collect it. Surveillance cameras record him leaving the money in the place described.
These encounters with Chapman and Semenko marked a closing chapter in one of the longest and most elaborate counter-intelligence operations ever mounted. The FBI code-named these interrelated investigations Operation Ghost Stories, and on 26 June 2010 a carefully choreographed drama was playing itself out.
By that day, after more than a decade of watching, caution was being thrown to the winds. The FBI was taking big risks in a final play. Using details of previous meetings between Chapman, Semenko, and their controllers that they had gleaned from surveillance, they engineered the rendezvouses of 26 June in such a way as to get the two spies, step by step, to incriminate themselves. The FBI was demonstrating that these two had regular contact with Russian handlers from the SVR foreign intelligence service, and that they were ready to take active steps to support deep-cover spies, or illegals, who had taken years to embed themselves in American society.
The trigger for this climatic phase of Operation Ghost Stories was the news that Colonel Alexander Poteyev, a senior SVR officer working for the Americans, had reached Minsk in Byelorussia the previous day. From there he was taken by the CIA into Ukraine and then to the US. This exfiltration had been full of tension, because when he requested a passport to travel overseas, Poteyev had been refused. He had only been able to make the train from Moscow to Minsk by using a fake travel document. And if his rescue didn’t make things complex, and tense enough, there was another major moving part to this operation’s final stage.
Just as the CIA asset was escaping Moscow, Russia’s president, Dmitri Medvedev, was being feted in Washington by President Barack Obama. Protocol required some acting of a high order from Obama. Two weeks before Medvedev’s arrival in America, the US president had received a detailed briefing about the Ghost Stories investigation. At this and a subsequent National Security Council meeting the principals had agreed the phased approach for bringing the whole matter to a head, but at the same time avoiding the presentational car crash of arresting a Russian agent network while that country’s leader was in the US.
POTUS took his honoured guest out for some proper American food at Ray’s Hell Burger, a crowded lunch stop over the river in Arlington. There they each had a cheeseburger, shared the fries, and Obama urged his visitor to watch out he didn’t get the juices on his tie. Making their way back to the White House, the two men made all of the diplomatic noises you’d expect.
‘It’s a pleasure to be here with my friend and partner,’ Obama began, then pledged, ‘The United States wants to be Russia’s partner as [Medvedev] pursues his vision of modernization and innovation in Russia.’ Economic summits followed, more talk of cooperation naturally at the G8, then they flew up to Toronto for the G20 meeting. The FBI had been given its signal, once the Russian leader was out of US airspace, to up the tempo in their operation to dismantle an SVR espionage operation that had taken years of effort and millions to construct.
The actual takedown had to wait until Medvedev was on his plane home from Canada. Craig Fair, one of the senior officers in CD1, the FBI counter-intelligence section running Ghost Stories, later explained, ‘We wanted to wait until he was out of this hemisphere to effect the arrests because it would not be proper to have that done during an international economic event.’
Poteyev, it is clear, had been an extraordinary agent. At the subsequent ‘in absentia’ trial held in Moscow, it was claimed that he was recruited in 1999. Western intelligence people suggest that was about right. The Russian had spent his career in Department S (sometimes called Line S), which ran the ‘illegal’ deep-cover operations considered the most sensitive and prestigious part of the former KGB’s work. Poteyev’s decision to spy for the Americans was the third and final of the betrayals I have alluded to in previous chapters because not only did it spawn this enormous, long-lasting Federal investigation, but it would also produce Skripal’s opportunity for freedom.